October 7, 1951

With Wild Dogmatism

By ROBERT LOWELL

THE SEVEN-LEAGUE CRUTCHES
By Randall Jarrell

andall Jarrell is our most talented poet under 40, and one whose wit, pathos and grace remind us more of Pope or Matthew Arnold than of any of his contemporaries. I don't know whether Jarrell is unappreciated or not -- it's hard to imagine anyone taking him lightly. He is almost brutally serious about literature and so bewilderingly gifted that it is impossible to comment on him without the humiliating thought that he himself could do it better.

He is a man of letters in the European sense, with real verve, imagination and uniqueness. Even his dogmatism is more wild and personal than we are accustomed to, completely unspoiled by the hedging "equanimity" that weakens the style and temperament of so many of our serious writers. His murderous intuitive phrases are famous; but at the same time his mind is essentially conservative and takes as much joy in rescuing the reputation of a sleeping good writer as in chloroforming a mediocre one.

Jarrell's prose intelligence -- he seems to know everything -- gives his poetry an extraordinary advantage over, for instance, a thunderbolt like Dylan Thomas, in dealing with the present. Jarrell is able to see our whole scientific, political and spiritual situation directly and on its own terms. He is a tireless discoverer of new themes and resources, and a master technician, who moves easily from the little to the grand. Monstrously knowing and monstrously innocent -- one does not know just where to find him ... a Wordsworth with the obsessions of Lewis Carroll.

"The Seven-League Crutches" should best be read with Jarrell's three earlier volumes. "Blood for a Stranger" (1942) is a Parnassian tour-de-force in the manner of Auden; nevertheless, it has several fine poems, the beginnings of better, and enough of the author's personality for John Crowe Ransom to write in ironic astonishment that Jarrell had "the velocity of an angel." "Little Friend, Little Friend" (1945), however, contains some of the best poems on modern war, better, I think, and far more professional than those of Wilfred Owen, which, though they seem pathetically eternal to us now, are sometimes amateurish and unfinished. The determined, passive, sacrificial lives of the pilots, inwardly so harmless and outwardly so destructive, are ideal subjects for Jarrell. In "Losses" (1948) and more rangingly in "Seven-League Crutches," new subjects appear. Using himself, children, characters from fairy stories, history and painting, he is still able to find beings that are determined, passive and sacrificial, but the experience is quiet, more complex and probably more universal. It's an odd universe, where a bruised joy or a bruised sorrow is forever commenting on itself with the gruff animal common sense and sophistication of Fontaine. Jarrell has gone far enough to be compared with his peers, the best lyric poets of the past: he has the same finesse and originality that they have, and his faults, a certain idiosyncratic willfulness and eclectic timidity, are only faults in this context.

Among the new poems, "Orient Express," a sequel, I think, to "Dover Beach," is a brilliantly expert combination of regular and irregular lines, buried rhymes, and sestina-like repeated rhymes, in which shifts in tone and rhythm are played off against the deadening roll of the train. "A Game at Salzburg" has the broken, charmed motion of someone thinking out loud. Both, in their different ways, are as skillful and lovely as any short poem I know of. "The Knight, Death, and the Devil" is a careful translation of Durer's engraving. The description is dense; the generalizations are profound. It is one of the most remarkable word-pictures in English verse or prose, and comparable to Auden's "Musee de Beaux Arts."

"The Contrary Poet" is an absolutely literal translation from Corbiere. The original is as clearly there as in the French, and it is also a great English poem. "The Night Before the Night Before Christmas" is long; it is also, perhaps, the best, most mannered, the most unforgettable and the most irritating poem in the book. Some of Jarrell's monologues are Robert Frost for "the man who reads Hamlet," or rather for a Hamlet who had been tutored by Jarrell. In "Seele in Raum," he masters Frost's methods and manages to make a simple half-mad woman speak in character, and yet with his own humor and terror.

My favorite is "A Girl in a Library," an apotheosis of the American girl, an immortal character piece, and the poem in which Jarrell perhaps best uses both his own qualities and his sense of popular culture. The girl is a college student, blonde and athletic.

But not so sadly; not so thoughtfully
And answers * * * guilelessly: I'm studying.

I quote the ending:

Sit and dream
One comes, a finger width beneath your skin,
To the braided maidens singing as they spin;
There sounds the shepherd's pipe, the watchman's rattle
Across the short dark distance of the years.
I am a thought of yours: and yet, you do not think ...
The firelight of a long, blind dreaming story
Lingers upon your lips; and I have seen
Firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes,
The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen.

"Belinda" was once drawn with something of the same hesitating satire and sympathy.

Mr. Lowell, who received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947, is author of "The Mills of the Kavanaughs."